If you send out regular newsletters (and if you don’t, why not?), your email list is one of your greatest assets. Let your subscribers know that they are special by offering “secret discounts” once or twice a year only to newsletter recipients. Your shopping cart software can be used to offer percent off coupons or special prices on a particular item or category of products. If you sell services, you can offer discount coupons through PayPal or your payment provider. We can help you set it up.

On your website, your newsletter signup form should include a teaser: “Want to be the first to hear about special deals and discounts? Sign up for our insiders’ newsletter and get advance notice of sales!”

Can you offer a small product or service at a specially-discounted price? Think of it as one bite-size taste of a product or service that might be seen as expensive enough to make a buyer pause. A bakery that normally sells cupcakes by the dozen or half-dozen might consider offering one especially luscious flavor at a discounted price. Coaches and service providers who charge by the hour could look at a half-hour session for an introductory price. Writers — put a short story on Kindle or the Apple bookstore at $0.99 to whet a reader’s appetite for your longer works. Even in frugal times, people feel the need to treat themselves, and if you give them a small way to do that, you’ve made sales you may not have gotten otherwise.

Make your customers feel special. They’ll love you for it… and your bottom line will show it!

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Review all the new rates on the USPS site and download a full description of the increases.

If your site has a shopping cart associated with it, you’ll want to be sure that it’s ready for the change as well.

Check Your Shopping Cart

If you sell physical products, you should know that all package rates are changing and there will be a new regional Priority Mail class added to fill the gap between Flat Rate and Zoned destination charges. Because of these new service classes, every shopping cart using real-time postage calculators will need to be revised and updated.

If you use a hosted shopping cart service (example: Infusionsoft, Ecwid, Shopify, Cafe Press), you will not be responsible for updating software. It might be a good idea, however, to check with your service and be sure they’ll be ready for the increases.

If you use PayPal’s shopping cart: PayPal does not use real-time postage calculation for orders. You set either a flat fee for shipping or a table of fees based on the order total. Check your current shipping amounts to see whether they will be adequate under the new rates and adjust accordingly.

If you have shopping cart software installed on your site: Check with your webmaster or your cart software support desk to find out when a new shipping module will be released for your software. If you are currently using real-time postage calculation in your software, consider temporarily changing to a flat rate or table ship method until the updated modules are released. This will keep your software running, allow orders to be processed, and keep your cart from experiencing downtime.

If you use table or flat-rate shipping on your own shopping cart, you won’t need to update your software. Do check the rates you are charging, however, and make adjustments for the increases if necessary.

Remember the date: January 22, 2012

Need help figuring out your situation? We’re here! Get in touch and we’ll be happy to review your setup and make recommendations to make the transition smooth for you and your customers. Don’t get caught!

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Christmas Party at the Ohop Grange, 1926

That joyous time of year when we go to Grandma and Grampa’s house to “celebrate” with all those relatives we haven’t seen since last year.

Uncle George, who tells the same elk-hunting-in-the-mountains story every single year, ignoring all the family’s glazed eyes and sudden increase in alcohol consumption. (He only went hunting once, in 1972, nearly froze his tush off, and vowed never to set foot outside again. The antlers on the wall in his study? He bought them off eBay.)

Madison, that cousin who works in Manhattan and takes particular delight in cornering you to tell you about the darling little cashmere sweater she bought (on sale!) at this marvelous little boutique, and how it would look so divine on you if they only carried plus sizes.

Grandma, who pinches your cheeks and tells you lovingly that you look like you could use a good meal and haven’t you (found that right person to marry) (decided to have babies) (decided to have babies so you’ve found somebody) yet?

Hiding out in the closet with a quart of eggnog looks really good about now.

Into this season of (oh) joy comes Tina Robbins of Open Roads Coaching. She’s written a gorgeous little safety manual for you called Over the River and Through the Woods: A Map for Making it Through the Holidays.

Tina’s worksheets and planning pages will help you learn how to reduce stress, prepare for parties and family gatherings — critical information for introverts! — and deal with too much food and too much shopping for the people in your life. She gives targeted tips on how to minimize the effects of stress on your body. She tells you how to prepare for those difficult family members (like cousin Madison) and what you can do to turn the situation around without causing ill feelings in return.

And if all else fails, she tells you the One Secret that you must have in your pocket — the one step that will get you out of the trickiest of family situations.

She’s offering all this in three packages —

• ebook only
• ebook plus two audio exercises to help you remain calm and conserve your energy
• and the Gold Package of ebook, audio exercises, and a 30-minute personal coaching session.

The value of these packages? Way higher than the absurdly low prices she is charging.

Go see Tina, buy the book… and learn how to make your holidays merry and much less stressful this year.

ps: If that’s not enough to convince you, she’s offering a free gift to get you started. It’s awesome. And it really helps!

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We’re all accustomed to marketers offering something free — an ebook, a white paper, a useful template or sales tool — in exchange for your email address on their mailing list. That technique is growing less useful for marketers; people have learned to sign up, get the freebie, and immediately unsubscribe from the list.

Recently, though, marketers are taking a new tack: the information is free to download if you send a tweet about it to your list or share it on Facebook.

Don't click on this. Really. It's just an illustration.

On the face of it, the “free for a tweet” idea makes a kind of sense. The marketer isn’t asking for your email address, and you don’t have to remember to unsubscribe. But I still have serious reservations and simply won’t take part. Here’s why.

1. I’m putting my name behind an unknown product

When you ask me to send a tweet to my list or share with my Facebook contacts, you are asking me to recommend your product sight unseen. Right offhand, I can think of two people who have that level of trust with me. (Naomi Dunford and the artist formerly known as Rachael Acklin, in case you are interested. Neither has ever asked me for a tweet in exchange for a product.)

I’d actually much rather give you an email address, download your product, and begin to build an opinion of you and your work. Assuming you are using aWeber, MailChimp, or a similar service that requires a double opt-in, I know you aren’t going to spam me and I know I can easily opt out if your offerings aren’t what I need.

2. Facebook? You stepped in what?

Yes, I have a Facebook account. I also have a deep aversion to the way that Facebook repeatedly abuses their users’ privacy settings. Under their current Frictionless Sharing model, “everywhere you go, everything you do is being sent back to your Facebook friends and stored on company servers” (PCWorld, September 26, 2011)

I won’t do it. That’s all. I don’t care how good you are.

Why not offer a choice?

To get your information into the largest number of hands, to help create the largest number of new followers and fans, give your readers the choice of email signup or “free for a tweet.”

It’s just good business.

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What do you know about these cloud services — where you can put your files on the cloud so you can access from anywhere — and it is also a way to back up files in case other methods fail… like your computer and external hard drives?

That’s a good question!

There are three basic types of cloud services.

Small storage/transfer services

An example of the small storage/transfer type of service is DropBox, a very easy to use system. You have a DropBox folder on your computer and a folder on the DropBox server. Anything you put into the folder on your computer is automatically backed up and synced. If you change it on your computer, it automatically is changed in the cloud.

There is also a public folder on DropBox. You can put files in there and send a link to someone else who doesn’t have a DropBox account so they can download them. (The remainder of your account is secure; if you never put anything in the public folder, no one has access to any of your files.) Unfortunately you can’t allow public access to folders that way — only individual files.

A basic DropBox account (2 GB) is free. If you are interested, use this link to join and then we both get an extra 250 MB for free.

Another option: If you have an Amazon Prime account ($79 per year), you can also get 5 GB backup storage for free through the Amazon Cloud drive. There are paid options if you need more backup space. It’s not as easy to use as DropBox because you have to open a web page to upload your files and there is no automatic syncing. However, you can store music on your Amazon Cloud drive for free — it doesn’t count against your 5 GB allotment.

A third option is Google. A Google Docs account will allow you 1 GB free, secure storage. Additional storage is insanely cheap: $5.00 per year for 5 GB. Additional storage up to 16 terabytes (16,000 GB) is available (if you ever feel the need to store the entire Internet at once).

Back-up-everything-on-your-computer service

Carbonite is an example of a large storage service which could be used as a substitute for an external offsite hard drive. For $59.00 per year, you can back up absolutely everything on your computer, no matter how much there is. Syncplicity ($15 per month for up to 50 GB) and Mozy ($5.99/month for 50 GB, $9.99/month for 125 GB) are two other options.

Cloud server account

The third type of service is an actual cloud server account, which would take the place of your webhosting account and would hold your websites. This would be useful if your sites had wildly varying traffic. A cloud server expands automatically to accommodate traffic spikes without crashing. It would also be useful for creating a company intranet, where you would need to offer secure access to employees from remote locations.

In most cases, I think this would be needlessly expensive and confusing. There’s a good bit of backend management necessary to run one of these accounts, and I imagine most people have better things to do than learn server management when all they want to do is write a blog.

Thanks for the question!

If you have questions, we have answers, and we love to hear from you. Send us a question!

Was this helpful?

Leave a comment or send a tweet. We love feedback!

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Yesterday there was a password breach on WordPress.org that allowed malware to be added to three plugins: WPTouch, AddThis, and W3 Total Cache. The malware was found and removed very quickly and the password hole was plugged.

If your WordPress site is running any of these three plugins, AND if you upgraded them yesterday from your dashboard, you may have gotten the bad versions. Please go back to your dashboard and update them again today. You should see an upgrade notice when you log in.

Make sure that you are running the following versions of the plugins. These are clean:

WPTouch: version 1.9.29

AddThis: version 2.2.0

W3 Total Cache: version 0.9.2.3

Here are links to stories about it in case you want more information:

wordpress.org/news/2011/06/passwords-reset/

wpmu.org/wordpress-security-exploit-found-upgrade-wptouch-addthis-and-w3-total-cache

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Yesterday there was a password breach on WordPress.org that allowed malware to be added to three plugins: WPTouch, AddThis, and W3 Total Cache. The malware was found and removed very quickly and the password hole was plugged.

If your WordPress site is running any of these three plugins, AND if you upgraded them yesterday from your dashboard, you may have gotten the bad versions. Please go back to your dashboard and update them again today. You should see an upgrade notice when you log in.

Make sure that you are running the following versions of the plugins. These are clean:

WPTouch: version 1.9.29

AddThis: version 2.2.0

W3 Total Cache: version 0.9.2.3

Here are links to stories about it in case you want more information:

wordpress.org/news/2011/06/passwords-reset/

wpmu.org/wordpress-security-exploit-found-upgrade-wptouch-addthis-and-w3-total-cache

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Ten Myths About Introverts

Introverts are often considered shy or socially inept people who don’t like other people, but this is not true. Introverts, who make up about 25-30% of the population, are defined as people who gain energy from being alone or with a small group of people. Extraverts*, on the other hand, need to be around other people; isolation saps their energy instead of feeding it.

Carl King discusses some of the common misconceptions about introverts, why they act as they do, and what you can do to ease interactions with them. Favorite quote:

“You cannot escape us, and to change us would lead to your demise.” <-- I made that up. I'm a screenwriter.

I’ve been intending for at least two years to write a review of The Introvert Advantage. Carl beat me to it. Go read his article instead.

*Derived from the Latin prefix extra-, meaning outside, but often spelled “extrovert” to match “introvert.” Both spellings are accepted as correct.

Disclosure: I’m a card-carrying introvert and everything he says is true from my point of view. I am not, however, a screenwriter.

Google Launches Tool for Online Reputation Management

You don’t have to worry about your online reputation to use this new tool from Google. If you have alerts set up — possibly to keep tabs on whether your artwork shows up in unauthorized places — you can benefit from having one central place to check for new references. Set up your Google profile and activate your dashboard.

Finger Painting: How A Realist Painter Makes Art with the iPad

Amazing. And all I manage to do is get smudges on the screen of my iPad.

How fast does your website load?

Google’s page ranking algorithm is placing an increasing amount of weight on how fast your site loads. If all other factors are the same, the faster-loading site moves up and the slower one moves down.

Loads.in is a simple way to measure the speed of your site. Just type in the URL of the page and wait for the result. If the answer is about 2-3 seconds or less, you’re in pretty good shape.

Want to receive new blog posts by email? Sign up below. Your email address will never be shared with anyone else.

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So now you have changed it, and your log-in username is something else, perhaps your first name. Go to your profile page: Sign in and click on “Howdy, (your name)!” in the upper righthand corner. Look down at the section headed “Name.”

Your username is the one you set up in place of the insecure “admin.” But note the box marked “Display name publicly as.” It shows your new and more secure username to the public on every post you write… so you haven’t gained much by changing it!

The WordPress developers have thought of this. Take this next very simple step to completely hide your login username: Fill in the First Name, Last Name, and nickname fields, choosing something completely different for “nickname.”

Scroll down and click “Update Profile.” Now go back up to the “Display name publicly as” section. A dropdown menu will show you several choices: FirstName, FirstName LastName, LastName FirstName, etc. Pick one, then “Update Profile” again.

Now your chosen display name — NOT the same as your login username — will show on all your posts.

PS: That “nickname” field that is required? That is useful in cases where you don’t want your name to appear as author — if you are writing incognito or using a pen name. If neither the FirstName or LastName fields is filled out, the display name will default to “nickname.” You could log in as Laura and post as Peanut.

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Unfortunately, you can’t change your username from the WordPress dashboard. Here’s how to do it without having to edit the database or dip your toes into MySQL.

Log in as “admin.” Go to Users -> Add New. Fill out the information for yourself, choosing a different username. (Remember that usernames are case-sensitive: If you sign up as “laura,” you can’t sign in as “Laura.”) Choose “Administrator” from the dropdown menu. Click “Add New User.”

Now sign out and sign back in using your new username. In the lefthand column of the Dashboard, click on Users.

Under the Admin username, click Delete.

Now you will see a screen allowing you to move all the “admin” posts and comments to your new username. Select the correct name and click “Confirm Deletion.”

That’s all there is to it! You’re done, and your blog is one step safer.

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